Beyond a certain point, adding more cores doesn't add any performance. On the desktop, your average user is only *actively* using one or two applications. A typical application can't really make use of more than 2-3 threads, and probably doesn't make full use of those. Four cores is plenty, 8 is luxury that will mostly be idle. Anything over 8 is just nonsense on a typical desktop.
" It could well be argued that parents shouldn't be putting their children through multiple surgeries and heavy doses of unnatural hormones to turn a boy into a girl or vice versa, in the vast majority of cases."
It could be argued that parents should not chop up their children and serve them up as supper. Jeeeesus.
Any parent who would even consider such physical alterations on a child is nuts. At best, they are imposing their own psychological problems on an innocent child. At worst, they are simply abusers. Either way, they should immediately lose custody of their children.
If a child has gender-identity problems - and that is a huge, to be quintuply checked "if", to be sure it isn't the parents who have the problems - then the treatment should be psychological. Teach them to live in the body they have. Attempts to physically alter the body from one gender to another are both crude and irreversible; the results are rarely satisfactory. The suicide rate among people who opt for the surgery are higher than for people who choose no surgery.
As for TFA: Gender dysphoria should be handled in school exactly the same way that the school curriculum discusses other mental disorders. Put it in the same class that discusses depression, bipolarism, anorexia, etc.. That's probably first mentioned around the age of 11 or 12.
Consciousness is clearly a continuum. As a very small child, you have no context to place all the sensory data into, and this restricts what you can do. It's interesting to read about people with hyperthymedia, also known as autobiographical memory, because many of them have clear memories from before the age of 1 year old. Which give you an insight into what is interesting or important to an infant, for example, "these clothes are scratchy". At that level, likely infants are always "conscious". So is a cockroach, no offense either to babies or cockroaches.
What I think is actually being asked, is what degree of awareness of self is present? "I am, and I know that I am"? That's the meta-consciousness referred to in TFS.
The thing is: Using texts is a lot better than nothing.
The other thing: Using texts is practical. I just had my phone die, with all sorts of authenticator apps on it: for Google, for my credit cards, for my bank, etc.. To get those all replaced is an absolute PITA. Whereas anything using texts was automatically moved to my new phone, just by moving the SIM card.
Security has to be practical, or people won't use it. Texts are very practical. Instead of encouraging people to do something else, why not improve texts? Just as an example, how about if texts were encrypted ("Signal" or some similar protocol)?
No, it's legit. Their app was in the play store, until some SJW in Google got offended at some post or other. iirc, Google demanded that Gab delete the post, Gab refused, since the only thing wrong with the post was the politics. So Google banned their app.
For those saying that Google's app store isn't a monopoly: tell us, please, what percentage of Android apps are installed from anywhere else.
I hadn't thought about it, but all major browsers allow users to block third-party cookies. If they would only make this the default behavior, it would do a world of good. And piss of the marketeers even more.
The only problem I ever have is when I want to read comments on a site that has outsource them to an external service like Disqus. But then, that's usually a good reason to skip the site entirely...
"Cultural appropriation". Really, that's what people do, and it is something to be encouraged. "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" and all that. How even SJWs can be dumb enough to think it's a bad thing, is just beyond comprehension.
Anyway, the term "bodega" comes from Spanish. In European Spanish, it refers to a winery. Apparently in some dialects (Mexico?) it can refer to the corner store where you buy your liquor. If "bodega" now means "corner store" in NYC, that's either very local or very new, and it seems entirely likely that these clueless founders don't know about the connection to alcohol.
Others have already pointed out: "they've invented the vending machine", and "how could they get funding for such trivial shit".
On a slightly more serious, but no less critical note, three criticisms:
- This is a business model with a huge logistics tail. Plus a lot of personnel: someone has to re-stock their little shops, someone has to clean them, etc.. This requires a lot of low-paid personnel, who will require supervision, and on up the chain. A Mom'n'pop business actually has the advantage here, because they mostly employee relatives and people they know.
- These microshops won't carry most of what people actually need and/or want at odd hours: perishables like bread and milk, or else high-margin items like alcohol and tobacco that actually keep lots of little shops in business.
- Nice neighborhoods aren't going to shop in little boxes. Put unattended boxes in not-nice neighborhoods, and they will get trashed, robbed, and vandalized
So it's hard to see who the customers are going to be, and harder to see how they're going to make any money. OTOH, this is all a social good: some VCs clearly have too much money. By throwing it at doomed-to-fail enterprises like Juicero and Bodega, they're putting their money back into circulation. That's really nice of them, don't you think?
I ran a small software company for a few years, before deciding that I actually hated networking, dealing with customers, etc.. I tried to oursource our sales a couple of times.
It's absolutely amazing how many marketing companies want to charge you a flat fee. For what, exactly? With a flat fee, they would earn just as much sitting on their backsides, as they would actually selling product. All but one of those companies lost interest, when I stated that compensation would be performance-based.
It may (but only may) be different with in-house sales. For external sales, I commissions (or some other form of performance-based compensation) ensure that the goals of the two organizations are aligned.
I'm surprised at the people upset about Tesla charging to unlock more of the battery's potential. Differential pricing (or whatever you prefer to call it) is as old as commerce. Think about the good old days of coupon clipping: The supermarkets are betting that people with plenty of money won't bother (and will pay a higher price), where as people with more time and less money will clip coupons (and pay less). The goal is to maximize your overall profit by selling the same product at different price points.
This also helps reduce your costs. You may even lose money on the lower prices, but the increased volume keeps your production costs lower (on a per-unit basis).
Finally: Note that this is done in the software world all the time. How many products out there use license keys? License keys restrict the functionality of the software. Theoretically, every customer could have full access to all functions, but the software seller blocks functionality for people who pay less. People who pay more, get more functionality. The software remains the same, regardless.
This. The SSN offers zero security. So many institutions have it that it just as well be public information. Plus, even after a data breach, you cannot change it.
There are so many things wrong with the US credit (and banking) system. Basically anyone can write checks on your account, if only they know your routing and account numbers. SSNs as proof of identity. Etc.. It's all a "good faith" system, with zero security.
Then these three corporations managing everyone's credit information: Consumers are not their customers, so they have little incentive to ensure that your data is correct, or to respond to problems. The consumers are, at best, sheep for them to fleece for a bit of extra money, with their so-called "trust' programs.
The latest trend are the "mobile friendly" websites that companies also use as their main site. While they may work on a small smartphone screen, on a laptop or desktop they are pure wastes of space. As an example, our bank recently changed their online interface. Where I used to be able to see 20-30 transactions on the screen, I can now see 5. It becomes a scroll-fest. And, really, who is going to pay bills, or reconcile a month's worth of transactions on their phone? Really?
Certainly in Europe, lots of "children" have arrived as refugees, without much in the way of identity papers. In more than a few cases, it turns out that they are in their 20's. In one egregious case, a guy was actually in his 30s. But generally there's no way to prove anything, no matter what people suspect. I don't know for certain what kinds of children the US is talking about, but seeing an age limit (on arrival) of 16, I expect it is similar to Europe. Children in their mid-teens, mostly male, many understating their age in order to be eligible.
Start with the law. Undocumented immigrants is weasel-wording for illegal immigrants. The US already went through one amnesty. The politicians at the time promised to close the borders, if the populace accepted granting the amnesty. Of course, they didn't, so the US now has roughly 10x as many illegal immigrants as there were at the time. Funny how granting amnesty to lawbreakers leads to more lawbreaking. So now the progressives want more amnesty.
Deport them. A nation that doesn't enforce its borders isn't really a nation.
What's equally stupid: there is no sane reason why deposits under $10k should be signs of criminal activity. That's just people trying to avoid a hassle - in fact, some bank personnel will advise people not to cross that limit, because it makes more work for the bank to do the reporting.
And yet: It isn't that the US government then takes a look at your accounts. No, not at all: they'll freeze your accounts, and in many cases seize the money under asset forfeiture laws.
Which is basically banditry, backed up by government guns.
And small banks for small business. That's the only way it can work. Big banks don't care about little businesses, because SMEs are a rounding error in their accounts.
When my wife and I wanted to expand our tiny business by buying a property, we were still with a big bank (UBS). First of all, whenever we needed something, we always had a different advisor, who was obviously the newest and least experienced person the bank had. Anyway, we sent a written summary of our idea to the bank, got a written rejection, and that was it. I called, and asked to speak to our advisor, and was told to get lost. I showed up in the lobby, phoned our advisor, and was told that I would not be allowed to see anyone, and I should just leave.
So I did. We moved all our business to a local bank, got our mortgage, and expanded our business as planned. That was 20 years ago and the business is doing fine, so we weren't nuts or anything.
Big banks just don't care about little customers. The one exception you may find, is if a big bank allows its local branches a lot of autonomy. That was the case for us: our local bank was still autonomous, even though it belonged to a big bank. That didn't last long - when the head banker retired, the branch was assimilated, and ultimately closed entirely. Which led us to change banks yet again, this time to a bank with zero international presence, truly only interested in local business.
Unemployment is anything but low The government has changed the definition over the years, and now publishes a number that excludes a lot of people who would really, really like a job. But once their unemployment benefits have run out, well, they magically aren't "unemployed" anymore, at least, not according to the government.
While I don't live in the US, I have friends and family there, and I don't have the impression that there are 6 million decent jobs waiting to be filled. There are a lot of crap jobs out there: lousy hours, or lousy pay, or no benefits. Yes, if you're hungry, you'll take a seasonal job. But if you're out of work in Wisconsin (say), you can't afford to move to Florida to pick oranges for a couple of weeks.
With 20% (real figure) of the potential workforce out of work, companies can also offer crap salaries for the few real jobs that exist. Outside of certain islands, inflation-adjusted take-home pay has been dropping for years. Overall, the US economy sucks. In fact, the US economy has been shrinking for more than a decade, and the huge levels of governmental debt are not helping. And that's a vicious cycle: meager tax income -> more debt -> depressed economy -> unemployment -> even more meager tax income. Rinse, repeat and amplify.
If we restrict ourselves to the tech field (which is a small part of the overall employment picture), TFA does have a point: Companies let the HR department fill vacancies. The typical big-company HR department has zero clue about tech, and will happily filter CVs based on an impossible list of buzzwords. Which means that the BS-artists (who likely have few real skills) have the best chance at landing a job. So the company gets burned, and the HR department filters harder on even more buzzwords. But again, that's only true for a small part of the market. The bigger problem is the spiraling combination of government debt and unemployment.
I last went to a movie, geez, when my kids were small (they're now 20+). We've thought about going since - you'd think having teenage kids would be a good reason - but...why? It's hard to see the attraction. In no particular order:
- Why do I want to travel to a theater and sit next to a bunch of strangers, who may or may not be quiet, spend half the movie texting on their phones, etc..
- I like the sound loud, but - geez - that was over the pain threshold. I came out with my ears ringing. At home, I can set the volume where I want it.
- Ads. Previews. Ads. More ads.
- Crappy, overpriced refreshments.
- No pause button.
So what are the positives of going to a theater? It's not the big screen, because we have a projector and a roll-up screen in our living room. You get a bigger picture than any large-screen TV, for a fraction of the price. You can roll the screen up, which it hard to do with a TV. Anyway, we have a bigger and better picture than a theater provides.
So the only thing left is Hollywood's insistence on releasing to theaters first. That's it. Everything else is better in your home cinema.
Last comment: Hollywood is too focused on the wrong things. The movies come across as SJW propaganda, at the expense of the stories. As an example, in Rogue One the selection of a woman a lead character with a black sidekick is just too obvious, and neither of them really brings their role to life. Was that poor acting, or weak writing? I don't know, and it doesn't really matter: the final scene is supposed to bring tears to your eyes, but you just don't care enough about the characters. So the final scene falls flat, the movie ends, and...was that all there was?
"Money as we know it depends on the authority of the state for credibility, with central banks typically managing its price and/or quantity. Cryptocurrencies skirt all that and instead rely on their supposedly unhackable technology to guarantee value."
Yeah, about that. Money used to be issued by private banks. Governments took took over this duty, not because they are any better at it, but because they wanted the power. There are still private currencies and complementary currencies, in countries that allow them, but they are likely only tolerated because their circulation is so small.
The internet initially allowed the completely free exchange of information, and some of us were naive enough to hope that it would reduce the power and dominance of nation states. Unfortunately, most people didn't care enough, and have let governments impose national-level regulations on this exchange of information: everything from the "Great Firewall of China" to Europe's "right to be forgotten". The potential of the internet has been hobbled.
Cryptocurrencies are likely next. Until now they have been nearly irrelevant. If the problems of transaction frequency can be solved, and they begin to be more widely accepted for payment, national governments will begin to take a dim view of currencies outside of their purview. Regulation will quickly follow. In most countries, the local tax authority has full access to your banking information - expect them to demand the ID of your cryptocurrency wallet, so that they can track your BitCoin transactions. Anonymous currencies like Monero may be prohibited outright (though enforcement will be difficult).
Goverments want power. Money is power, currency is money.
It's been said before: BitCoin is not anonymous. That's not even part of the design: by definition, the blockchain makes all transactions fully traceable. The only anonymity is one of obscurity, and the IRS software does not address this: how do you map a BitCoin address to a particular person.
If you have that information, however, then BitCoin is fully open, and transactions are fully traceable. Even the "mixers" are just a stupid game that serve little purpose other that to impose a fee on people with guilty consciences.
If you want anonymity, you need something like Monero. I'm wondering how long it will take for governments to start trying to make anonymous currencies illegal. After all, if you have nothing to hide, you should be happy to publish all of your financial details for all the world to see/sarc
This. IANAL, but I doubt that this would be allowed in any European country either.
Still, it's an a$$hole move, and there's no reason for it. Make it an opt-in for existing systems and opt-out for new ones, and they would avoid all this negative publicity.
This is a dangerous idea. Some group, not answerable to anyone, gets to put people into a database of "wrongthink". TFS and TFA talk about "hate crimes" - one would like that to imply that they would only collect law enforcement data, ideally restricted to actual convictions. That might be ok, but that's not what they're doing.
In fact, the "hate crime" collection apparently involves becoming a central repository for any sort of article, blog post, or whatever that talks about supposed incidents of "hate". That would be bad enough, since the criteria are entirely subjective.
But it's worse than that. If you go to the actual project page, they want to document hate crimes and "bias incidents". For the latter, they are happy to accept individual stories. Who gets to define what constitutes a "bias" incident?
At best, this is just another SJW right-think project, giving the long list of corporate sponsors a wonderful opportunity to virtue signal. At worst, if individual people are named in the individual stories they intend to collect, it will become a form of arbitrary, non-judicial punishment with no recourse to the people named.
Hacking could violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or perhaps even wiretapping legislation.
This is clearly a reference to US law. ProtonMail is based in Switzerland, hence, US law is utterly irrelevant. I know that most/.ers are located in the US, but your country does not encompass the world.
Of course, we have our own laws regarding electronic breaking and entering, and IANAL so I'm not going to speculate about the legalities here. Just wanted to point out that ProtonMail is not a US company, so comments about US law are off-base.
I have no idea what happened with this guy and his car in Charlottesville. But then, no one else really does either. So it's really kind of sad to see the continual press coverage about how he deliberately search out left-wing protesters in order to run them down. This is what the press says, and what their video clips seem to show.
However, lots of people captured the event on their phones and other videos are circulating that support a different interpretation: the guy drove his car down a road he shouldn't have - stupidity, accident, who knows - and was swarmed by protesters. In this interpretation, he did what you are supposed to do: never stop, keep driving no matter what.
Which interpretation is right? I have no idea. The point is: neither does anyone else other that the driver himself. He deserves his day in court, and I wish/. and the rest of the Internet would let him have it.
I just wrote a comment grousing about yet-another-walled-off-chat-app. But then I did a brief search, and...
Surprise: Allo apparently uses the Signal protocol, which is an open standard. More, it's a standard that included end-to-end encryption. Unless Google deliberately and specifically broke compatibility, it should be possible for an Allo user to communicate with a Signal user, or anyone else with an app that supports the Signal protocol.
At the moment, I stick to SMS because that lets me send a message to someone without caring about what app they happen to have installed. Everyone can receive an SMS. Kind of pathetic, but there we are. But I use Signal to send those SMS messages, so if someone has a Signal-compatible app, it should automatically upgrade the communications channel.
Here's hoping: If this is the beginning of a movement back to open protocols, the world will be a better place...
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Beyond a certain point, adding more cores doesn't add any performance. On the desktop, your average user is only *actively* using one or two applications. A typical application can't really make use of more than 2-3 threads, and probably doesn't make full use of those. Four cores is plenty, 8 is luxury that will mostly be idle. Anything over 8 is just nonsense on a typical desktop.
" It could well be argued that parents shouldn't be putting their children through multiple surgeries and heavy doses of unnatural hormones to turn a boy into a girl or vice versa, in the vast majority of cases."
It could be argued that parents should not chop up their children and serve them up as supper. Jeeeesus.
Any parent who would even consider such physical alterations on a child is nuts. At best, they are imposing their own psychological problems on an innocent child. At worst, they are simply abusers. Either way, they should immediately lose custody of their children.
If a child has gender-identity problems - and that is a huge, to be quintuply checked "if", to be sure it isn't the parents who have the problems - then the treatment should be psychological. Teach them to live in the body they have. Attempts to physically alter the body from one gender to another are both crude and irreversible; the results are rarely satisfactory. The suicide rate among people who opt for the surgery are higher than for people who choose no surgery.
As for TFA: Gender dysphoria should be handled in school exactly the same way that the school curriculum discusses other mental disorders. Put it in the same class that discusses depression, bipolarism, anorexia, etc.. That's probably first mentioned around the age of 11 or 12.
Consciousness is clearly a continuum. As a very small child, you have no context to place all the sensory data into, and this restricts what you can do. It's interesting to read about people with hyperthymedia, also known as autobiographical memory, because many of them have clear memories from before the age of 1 year old. Which give you an insight into what is interesting or important to an infant, for example, "these clothes are scratchy". At that level, likely infants are always "conscious". So is a cockroach, no offense either to babies or cockroaches.
What I think is actually being asked, is what degree of awareness of self is present? "I am, and I know that I am"? That's the meta-consciousness referred to in TFS.
The thing is: Using texts is a lot better than nothing.
The other thing: Using texts is practical. I just had my phone die, with all sorts of authenticator apps on it: for Google, for my credit cards, for my bank, etc.. To get those all replaced is an absolute PITA. Whereas anything using texts was automatically moved to my new phone, just by moving the SIM card.
Security has to be practical, or people won't use it. Texts are very practical. Instead of encouraging people to do something else, why not improve texts? Just as an example, how about if texts were encrypted ("Signal" or some similar protocol)?
No, it's legit. Their app was in the play store, until some SJW in Google got offended at some post or other. iirc, Google demanded that Gab delete the post, Gab refused, since the only thing wrong with the post was the politics. So Google banned their app.
For those saying that Google's app store isn't a monopoly: tell us, please, what percentage of Android apps are installed from anywhere else.
I hadn't thought about it, but all major browsers allow users to block third-party cookies. If they would only make this the default behavior, it would do a world of good. And piss of the marketeers even more.
The only problem I ever have is when I want to read comments on a site that has outsource them to an external service like Disqus. But then, that's usually a good reason to skip the site entirely...
"Cultural appropriation". Really, that's what people do, and it is something to be encouraged. "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" and all that. How even SJWs can be dumb enough to think it's a bad thing, is just beyond comprehension.
Anyway, the term "bodega" comes from Spanish. In European Spanish, it refers to a winery. Apparently in some dialects (Mexico?) it can refer to the corner store where you buy your liquor. If "bodega" now means "corner store" in NYC, that's either very local or very new, and it seems entirely likely that these clueless founders don't know about the connection to alcohol.
Others have already pointed out: "they've invented the vending machine", and "how could they get funding for such trivial shit".
On a slightly more serious, but no less critical note, three criticisms:
- This is a business model with a huge logistics tail. Plus a lot of personnel: someone has to re-stock their little shops, someone has to clean them, etc.. This requires a lot of low-paid personnel, who will require supervision, and on up the chain. A Mom'n'pop business actually has the advantage here, because they mostly employee relatives and people they know.
- These microshops won't carry most of what people actually need and/or want at odd hours: perishables like bread and milk, or else high-margin items like alcohol and tobacco that actually keep lots of little shops in business.
- Nice neighborhoods aren't going to shop in little boxes. Put unattended boxes in not-nice neighborhoods, and they will get trashed, robbed, and vandalized
So it's hard to see who the customers are going to be, and harder to see how they're going to make any money. OTOH, this is all a social good: some VCs clearly have too much money. By throwing it at doomed-to-fail enterprises like Juicero and Bodega, they're putting their money back into circulation. That's really nice of them, don't you think?
I ran a small software company for a few years, before deciding that I actually hated networking, dealing with customers, etc.. I tried to oursource our sales a couple of times.
It's absolutely amazing how many marketing companies want to charge you a flat fee. For what, exactly? With a flat fee, they would earn just as much sitting on their backsides, as they would actually selling product.
All but one of those companies lost interest, when I stated that compensation would be performance-based.
It may (but only may) be different with in-house sales. For external sales, I commissions (or some other form of performance-based compensation) ensure that the goals of the two organizations are aligned.
I'm surprised at the people upset about Tesla charging to unlock more of the battery's potential. Differential pricing (or whatever you prefer to call it) is as old as commerce. Think about the good old days of coupon clipping: The supermarkets are betting that people with plenty of money won't bother (and will pay a higher price), where as people with more time and less money will clip coupons (and pay less). The goal is to maximize your overall profit by selling the same product at different price points.
This also helps reduce your costs. You may even lose money on the lower prices, but the increased volume keeps your production costs lower (on a per-unit basis).
Finally: Note that this is done in the software world all the time. How many products out there use license keys? License keys restrict the functionality of the software. Theoretically, every customer could have full access to all functions, but the software seller blocks functionality for people who pay less. People who pay more, get more functionality. The software remains the same, regardless.
This. The SSN offers zero security. So many institutions have it that it just as well be public information. Plus, even after a data breach, you cannot change it.
There are so many things wrong with the US credit (and banking) system. Basically anyone can write checks on your account, if only they know your routing and account numbers. SSNs as proof of identity. Etc.. It's all a "good faith" system, with zero security.
Then these three corporations managing everyone's credit information: Consumers are not their customers, so they have little incentive to ensure that your data is correct, or to respond to problems. The consumers are, at best, sheep for them to fleece for a bit of extra money, with their so-called "trust' programs.
No, Mildred, blockchains are not a panacea. In fact, this is a typically stupid application of the idea.
Some MBA type, who only thinks he understands blockchains, figured this would be great.
The latest trend are the "mobile friendly" websites that companies also use as their main site. While they may work on a small smartphone screen, on a laptop or desktop they are pure wastes of space. As an example, our bank recently changed their online interface. Where I used to be able to see 20-30 transactions on the screen, I can now see 5. It becomes a scroll-fest. And, really, who is going to pay bills, or reconcile a month's worth of transactions on their phone? Really?
Or the Swiss trains: they have a wonderful new website, mobile friendly, with big pictures and all stuff that moves and wiggles. Of course, the menus pop up and cover the screen when you accidentally mouse over them, it loses your selections from one screen to the next, forgets you are logged in when you want to pay - in fact, it's almost impossible to actually purchase a ticket. But it's modern! And mobile friendly! Crap.
Designers have a disease: They feel a need to "make their mark" by changing things, even when changing means making them worse.
Certainly in Europe, lots of "children" have arrived as refugees, without much in the way of identity papers. In more than a few cases, it turns out that they are in their 20's. In one egregious case, a guy was actually in his 30s. But generally there's no way to prove anything, no matter what people suspect. I don't know for certain what kinds of children the US is talking about, but seeing an age limit (on arrival) of 16, I expect it is similar to Europe. Children in their mid-teens, mostly male, many understating their age in order to be eligible.
Start with the law. Undocumented immigrants is weasel-wording for illegal immigrants. The US already went through one amnesty. The politicians at the time promised to close the borders, if the populace accepted granting the amnesty. Of course, they didn't, so the US now has roughly 10x as many illegal immigrants as there were at the time. Funny how granting amnesty to lawbreakers leads to more lawbreaking. So now the progressives want more amnesty.
Deport them. A nation that doesn't enforce its borders isn't really a nation.
What's equally stupid: there is no sane reason why deposits under $10k should be signs of criminal activity. That's just people trying to avoid a hassle - in fact, some bank personnel will advise people not to cross that limit, because it makes more work for the bank to do the reporting.
And yet: It isn't that the US government then takes a look at your accounts. No, not at all: they'll freeze your accounts, and in many cases seize the money under asset forfeiture laws.
Which is basically banditry, backed up by government guns.
And small banks for small business. That's the only way it can work. Big banks don't care about little businesses, because SMEs are a rounding error in their accounts.
When my wife and I wanted to expand our tiny business by buying a property, we were still with a big bank (UBS). First of all, whenever we needed something, we always had a different advisor, who was obviously the newest and least experienced person the bank had. Anyway, we sent a written summary of our idea to the bank, got a written rejection, and that was it. I called, and asked to speak to our advisor, and was told to get lost. I showed up in the lobby, phoned our advisor, and was told that I would not be allowed to see anyone, and I should just leave.
So I did. We moved all our business to a local bank, got our mortgage, and expanded our business as planned. That was 20 years ago and the business is doing fine, so we weren't nuts or anything.
Big banks just don't care about little customers. The one exception you may find, is if a big bank allows its local branches a lot of autonomy. That was the case for us: our local bank was still autonomous, even though it belonged to a big bank. That didn't last long - when the head banker retired, the branch was assimilated, and ultimately closed entirely. Which led us to change banks yet again, this time to a bank with zero international presence, truly only interested in local business.
Unemployment is anything but low The government has changed the definition over the years, and now publishes a number that excludes a lot of people who would really, really like a job. But once their unemployment benefits have run out, well, they magically aren't "unemployed" anymore, at least, not according to the government.
While I don't live in the US, I have friends and family there, and I don't have the impression that there are 6 million decent jobs waiting to be filled. There are a lot of crap jobs out there: lousy hours, or lousy pay, or no benefits. Yes, if you're hungry, you'll take a seasonal job. But if you're out of work in Wisconsin (say), you can't afford to move to Florida to pick oranges for a couple of weeks.
With 20% (real figure) of the potential workforce out of work, companies can also offer crap salaries for the few real jobs that exist. Outside of certain islands, inflation-adjusted take-home pay has been dropping for years. Overall, the US economy sucks. In fact, the US economy has been shrinking for more than a decade, and the huge levels of governmental debt are not helping. And that's a vicious cycle: meager tax income -> more debt -> depressed economy -> unemployment -> even more meager tax income. Rinse, repeat and amplify.
If we restrict ourselves to the tech field (which is a small part of the overall employment picture), TFA does have a point: Companies let the HR department fill vacancies. The typical big-company HR department has zero clue about tech, and will happily filter CVs based on an impossible list of buzzwords. Which means that the BS-artists (who likely have few real skills) have the best chance at landing a job. So the company gets burned, and the HR department filters harder on even more buzzwords. But again, that's only true for a small part of the market. The bigger problem is the spiraling combination of government debt and unemployment.
I last went to a movie, geez, when my kids were small (they're now 20+). We've thought about going since - you'd think having teenage kids would be a good reason - but...why? It's hard to see the attraction. In no particular order:
- Why do I want to travel to a theater and sit next to a bunch of strangers, who may or may not be quiet, spend half the movie texting on their phones, etc..
- I like the sound loud, but - geez - that was over the pain threshold. I came out with my ears ringing. At home, I can set the volume where I want it.
- Ads. Previews. Ads. More ads.
- Crappy, overpriced refreshments.
- No pause button.
So what are the positives of going to a theater? It's not the big screen, because we have a projector and a roll-up screen in our living room. You get a bigger picture than any large-screen TV, for a fraction of the price. You can roll the screen up, which it hard to do with a TV. Anyway, we have a bigger and better picture than a theater provides.
So the only thing left is Hollywood's insistence on releasing to theaters first. That's it. Everything else is better in your home cinema.
Last comment: Hollywood is too focused on the wrong things. The movies come across as SJW propaganda, at the expense of the stories. As an example, in Rogue One the selection of a woman a lead character with a black sidekick is just too obvious, and neither of them really brings their role to life. Was that poor acting, or weak writing? I don't know, and it doesn't really matter: the final scene is supposed to bring tears to your eyes, but you just don't care enough about the characters. So the final scene falls flat, the movie ends, and...was that all there was?
"Money as we know it depends on the authority of the state for credibility, with central banks typically managing its price and/or quantity. Cryptocurrencies skirt all that and instead rely on their supposedly unhackable technology to guarantee value."
Yeah, about that. Money used to be issued by private banks. Governments took took over this duty, not because they are any better at it, but because they wanted the power. There are still private currencies and complementary currencies, in countries that allow them, but they are likely only tolerated because their circulation is so small.
The internet initially allowed the completely free exchange of information, and some of us were naive enough to hope that it would reduce the power and dominance of nation states. Unfortunately, most people didn't care enough, and have let governments impose national-level regulations on this exchange of information: everything from the "Great Firewall of China" to Europe's "right to be forgotten". The potential of the internet has been hobbled.
Cryptocurrencies are likely next. Until now they have been nearly irrelevant. If the problems of transaction frequency can be solved, and they begin to be more widely accepted for payment, national governments will begin to take a dim view of currencies outside of their purview. Regulation will quickly follow. In most countries, the local tax authority has full access to your banking information - expect them to demand the ID of your cryptocurrency wallet, so that they can track your BitCoin transactions. Anonymous currencies like Monero may be prohibited outright (though enforcement will be difficult).
Goverments want power. Money is power, currency is money.
It's been said before: BitCoin is not anonymous. That's not even part of the design: by definition, the blockchain makes all transactions fully traceable. The only anonymity is one of obscurity, and the IRS software does not address this: how do you map a BitCoin address to a particular person.
If you have that information, however, then BitCoin is fully open, and transactions are fully traceable. Even the "mixers" are just a stupid game that serve little purpose other that to impose a fee on people with guilty consciences.
If you want anonymity, you need something like Monero. I'm wondering how long it will take for governments to start trying to make anonymous currencies illegal. After all, if you have nothing to hide, you should be happy to publish all of your financial details for all the world to see /sarc
This. IANAL, but I doubt that this would be allowed in any European country either.
Still, it's an a$$hole move, and there's no reason for it. Make it an opt-in for existing systems and opt-out for new ones, and they would avoid all this negative publicity.
This is a dangerous idea. Some group, not answerable to anyone, gets to put people into a database of "wrongthink". TFS and TFA talk about "hate crimes" - one would like that to imply that they would only collect law enforcement data, ideally restricted to actual convictions. That might be ok, but that's not what they're doing.
In fact, the "hate crime" collection apparently involves becoming a central repository for any sort of article, blog post, or whatever that talks about supposed incidents of "hate". That would be bad enough, since the criteria are entirely subjective.
But it's worse than that. If you go to the actual project page, they want to document hate crimes and "bias incidents". For the latter, they are happy to accept individual stories. Who gets to define what constitutes a "bias" incident?
At best, this is just another SJW right-think project, giving the long list of corporate sponsors a wonderful opportunity to virtue signal. At worst, if individual people are named in the individual stories they intend to collect, it will become a form of arbitrary, non-judicial punishment with no recourse to the people named.
Hacking could violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or perhaps even wiretapping legislation.
This is clearly a reference to US law. ProtonMail is based in Switzerland, hence, US law is utterly irrelevant. I know that most /.ers are located in the US, but your country does not encompass the world.
Of course, we have our own laws regarding electronic breaking and entering, and IANAL so I'm not going to speculate about the legalities here. Just wanted to point out that ProtonMail is not a US company, so comments about US law are off-base.
I have no idea what happened with this guy and his car in Charlottesville. But then, no one else really does either. So it's really kind of sad to see the continual press coverage about how he deliberately search out left-wing protesters in order to run them down. This is what the press says, and what their video clips seem to show.
However, lots of people captured the event on their phones and other videos are circulating that support a different interpretation: the guy drove his car down a road he shouldn't have - stupidity, accident, who knows - and was swarmed by protesters. In this interpretation, he did what you are supposed to do: never stop, keep driving no matter what.
Which interpretation is right? I have no idea. The point is: neither does anyone else other that the driver himself. He deserves his day in court, and I wish /. and the rest of the Internet would let him have it.
I just wrote a comment grousing about yet-another-walled-off-chat-app. But then I did a brief search, and...
Surprise: Allo apparently uses the Signal protocol, which is an open standard. More, it's a standard that included end-to-end encryption. Unless Google deliberately and specifically broke compatibility, it should be possible for an Allo user to communicate with a Signal user, or anyone else with an app that supports the Signal protocol.
At the moment, I stick to SMS because that lets me send a message to someone without caring about what app they happen to have installed. Everyone can receive an SMS. Kind of pathetic, but there we are. But I use Signal to send those SMS messages, so if someone has a Signal-compatible app, it should automatically upgrade the communications channel.
Here's hoping: If this is the beginning of a movement back to open protocols, the world will be a better place...